Ashford Castle, Ireland wedding

It's hard to overstate the beauty of Ashford Castle: It was something so profound that Casey knew she had to share it with her friends and family, even though absolutely none of them, Casey and Ford included, live in Ireland. But maybe, for a second, let's not put it center-stage. Let's focus on the bonds that made Casey and Ford plan a complicated multi-day celebration in an Irish castle just to show their friends and family a good time, and the bonds that made so many of these friends and family show up that they completely sold out the castle.

And it's not a small castle.

Ireland is an incredibly gorgeous country -- the cliches are true. There are colors of green that don't exist anywhere else, times when you have to turn down the saturation in your camera just so reality doesn't look fake. But, of course, it comes with a lot of what the Irish call "soft" weather: Rain, and a lot of it.

So yes, it rained on this wedding, but … well, all you need to know about the mood is that, after days of carousing together, there was enough joyful energy left that festivities were still going strong by sunrise.

Thank you to Olivia Buckley for her fantastic planning work, making a wet, complicated event come out perfectly, and to Casey and Ford for kindly planning their Ireland wedding just at the right time for our "working honeymoon" in the best place we could imagine.

Yale Club wedding

We loved this wedding so much it hurts.

If we’d written that at any other time, you could write it off as florid hyperbole. But now it is keenly true: Not only are Melissa and Zach fantastic people to be around whose love for each other is obvious, but they celebrated that love and their commitment fervently and wildly, surrounded by friends and family, dancing and laughing and sweating and dipping each other deeply to the amazing music of The Hook Club in the regal beauty of Yale Club.

We think that it’s so important to be able to do this that we’ve dedicated our lives to telling these sorts of stories, and it hurts to have so much uncertainty about when we can all safely crowd together on a dance floor again, singing and yelling and smiling until our cheeks ache.

But seeing amazing celebrations like theirs still brings us an incredible amount of joy, because we know that we will get back there again. This, too, shall pass. And no celebration will ever feel sweeter than when we can all come back together.

And Melissa has a heck of a party dress for just such an occasion.

We want to reward people willing to take a chance on hope as well as help people through challenging times, so we have extended our 2020 Sales to weddings as well. We cannot wait to tell stories of celebration again, and we are well-practiced at helping couples work through related details and uncertainty.

Central Park Boathouse wedding

Everything about Lauren and Doug’s Central Park wedding was gorgeous, including the weather. We specialize in making things work well when everything goes wrong, but it’s sure nice when it doesn’t! They started the day at the 1 Hotel Central Park with close family and friends, giving us the opportunity for a first look on a balcony overlooking midtown.

The ceremony and reception were at the Central Park Boathouse, which is not just beautiful inside but surrounded by some of New York’s most well-known pastoral landmarks. Of course, this can make navigating around hordes of tourists a challenge, but it helps that we have every nook and cranny around there memorized, including paths much less travelled.

FEAST at Round Hill wedding

We have had many different sorts of connections and ongoing relationships with our clients, but Gina’s is unique: She is the only person whose wedding we photographed who was also a vendor at our wedding. And appropriately for a venue officially named “FEAST,” she was in charge of our fantastic catering team from CxRA.

We knew Gina was a powerhouse, but we had also been won over by Pat’s easygoing nature and broad smile during their engagement shoot. But the wedding exceeded even our high expectations, from its beauty to the raucous fun of the reception to, yes, the food.

The fantastic Jashim Jalal gave us invaluable assistance at this wedding.

The Lake House Inn Wedding

I love that all you need to know about Cecilia's grace as a trained dancer is to watch her do … anything.

Newport Vineyard wedding -- Brenizer Method panorama

One awesome couple, one amazing vineyard after the rain, and a whole lotta frames with an 85mm f/1.4.

I've been playing around with some of the new smartphone tech because I'm still just a photo nerd at heart, and I admit that as artificial depth of field gets better and better through computational photography, I stopped and said "Hm, moving this slider is a lot easier than taking a hundred images and feeding them through a computer." But of course, that's only because of an upshot of the less talked-about side of the smartphone photography revolution: not that most photos are taken on phones, but also that most are viewed on them as well.

I've never truly seen most of the Brenizer Method photos I've delivered. This photo could be printed at 300 dpi at five feet across. I've made those prints and each time I've been surprised: "Oh, *that's* what this photo really looks like!" It's part of the point of also taking the long way around and making things specifically so that they last and go a step beyond what is easy. (Even though I still often use DoF-faking apps for fun and personal creativity. I'd rather play on the lawn than tell the kids to get off it.)